David A. Freidel

Culture Areas and Interaction Spheres: Contrasting Approaches to the Emergence of Civilization in the Maya Lowlands

Recently several models have been proposed for the origin and evolution of lowland Maya civilization. These models share a basic spatial framework, the culture area, which is logically tied to a particular theoretical approach to the emergence of lowland Maya civilization. The culture area approach rests on the premise that sociocultural innovation occurs as a localized response to local natural and social conditions. Such innovation subsequently diffuses outside the local area through successful competition with alternatives. The empirical archaeological expectations of models based upon this approach are not satisfied at the site of Cerros, a Late Preclassic center on the coast of northern Belize. An alternative approach, the interaction sphere, better accommodates the evidence from Cerros and other Preclassic sites in the Maya Lowlands. The culture area models, the evidence from Cerros, and the interaction sphere approach and its theoretical ramifications are discussed.

The role of shamanism in Mesoamerican art: A reassessment. Comments. Authors' reply

Increasing numbers of scholars are relying on the concept of shamanism to interpret preColumbian artworks without examining its origins and questioning its viability. This essay explores the historical roots of this fields romance with the shaman and offers an explanation of its appeal. We argue that by avoiding such terms as priest, doctor, and political leader, the words shaman and shamanism have helped scholars to other preColumbian peoples by portraying them as steeped in magic and the spiritual. We begin with a look at when, where, and why this reductive representation emerged in preColumbian art studies, suggesting that it originated as an idealist aversion to materialist explanations of human behavior. We then examine the sources and validity of the principal criteria used by PreColumbianists to identify shamanism in works of art and look at some possible reasons for shamanisms popularity among them. We conclude that there is a pressing need to create a more refined, more nuanced terminology that w...Increasing numbers of scholars are relying on the concept of shamanism to interpret preColumbian artworks without examining its origins and questioning its viability. This essay explores the historical roots of this fields romance with the shaman and offers an explanation of its appeal. We argue that by avoiding such terms as priest, doctor, and political leader, the words shaman and shamanism have helped scholars to other preColumbian peoples by portraying them as steeped in magic and the spiritual. We begin with a look at when, where, and why this reductive representation emerged in preColumbian art studies, suggesting that it originated as an idealist aversion to materialist explanations of human behavior. We then examine the sources and validity of the principal criteria used by PreColumbianists to identify shamanism in works of art and look at some possible reasons for shamanisms popularity among them. We conclude that there is a pressing need to create a more refined, more nuanced terminology that would distinguish, crossculturally, among the many different kinds of roles currently lumped together under the vague and homogenizing rubric of shaman.

Subsistence, Trade, and Development of the Coastal Maya

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses subsistence, trade, and development of the Coastal Maya. The correlation of commercial production with trade centers can be documented at other locations on the lowland coasts. Even the great trading center of Chauaca located near the rich north-coast salt beds diversified production into groves of trees bearing copal incense. In brief, there is reason to believe that Contact period Maya trading communities were involved in the gathering of local agricultural products for sale, as well as the local distribution and regional trans-shipment of exotic commodities. There is also reason to believe that trading centers in the more marginal agricultural areas generally attempted to avoid having to expend their precious capital resources on food, and thus intensified or regulated food production to maintain autonomy. In all cases, intensive labor investment in agricultural production had ultimately a pecuniary motive. In the case of at least one important Late Preclassic coastal trading community, Cerros, a complex water-management system relating to agricultural intensification has been found. The organization of this system suggests that the upgrading of food production in the community and/or the producing of commercial crops motivated its construction. This same organization refutes the alternative possibility that the community grew up around a locale inherently suitable for agricultural intensification. Moreover, the settlement-pattern evidence does not indicate that its construction was a response to population pressure at the local or areal levels.

The Flesh of God: Cosmology, Food, and the Origins of Political Power in Ancient Southeastern Mesoamerica

I come today as a pilgrim from the east, from Maya lowland country, sister and daughter civilization, to the heartland of the first civilization in our American part of the world: Olman, Olmec country. I will return to Maya country at the end of this journey. In Olman human ingenuity met a confluence of circumstances that gave birth to civilization. That birth was not engendered by people from Africa, or Asia, or Europe, but by Americans native to their place and time. You, the knowledgeable and dedicated creators of our understanding of Olman, have decisively confirmed the virgin nature of this birth. To be sure, we must all respect our ignorance of this human-made miracle and proceed to agree reluctantly to grand generalizations about it. But our science also demands bold conjecture and new knowledge comes both from the ground, as at El Manati, San Lorenzo, La Venta, Chiapa de Corzo and La Blanca, and from inspired contemplation of what happened at those places to create the intentional patterns now meticulously documented. The bold conjecture is this: Claude Levi-Strauss, great anthropologist, said that food is good to think as well as to eat. When people domesticated food, they domesticated themselves. That is to say, the means of physically reproducing people became just as dependent on the organized and conceptual model of the universe articulated by the wise and eloquent people in society as did the production of food. Domestication succeeds as a source of staple food when such cosmological models persist in the face of repeated failure. For growing food requires people to defy the arbitrary catastrophes of nature and create social means of countering them. In Olman, people created a model of the world in which they could effectively intervene in the cycles of nature. The metaphors appear naive: to control rain, to give birth to maize, to contest with immortal disease and famine through the ballgame. But the social reality leaders bound to that religion worked. Over centuries of trial and error the leaders emerged as divine kings mobilizing labor not just to self-aggrandizement but to social survival; to the task of redistributing the risks of subsistence in ways that averted famine. How Olmec kings, after centuries of effort, became maize, the flesh of god and the flesh of their people, is the challenge facing us as scientists. That they became maize, and passed that truth on to successor civilizations of southeastern Mesoamerica, among them the lowland Maya, is a working hypothesis of growing productivity. David Freidel, the LLILAS conference “Olmec: The Origins of Ancient Mexican Civilization” November 21, 2008.

Placing the Centre, Centring the Place: the Influence of Formative Sacbeob in Classic Site Design at Yaxuná, Yucatán

A series of Formative Period causeways ( sacbeob ) at the Maya site of Yaxuna, Yucatan, Mexico, constituted elements of an early geomantic plan that was renegotiated by the inhabitants of this centre for 1500–2000 years. This plan embodied a series of sacred metaphors including the World Tree and Milky Way. After its initial construction, this widely recognized sacred landscape was reinterpreted using the language of causeways and buildings by people with competing interests. A consideration of how the geomantic plan was differentially modified sheds light on important social transitions throughout the history of the site, as well as the role of landscape and shared memory among the ancient Yucatec Maya of Yaxuna.

Two Late Preclassic Ballcourts at the Lowland Maya Center of Cerros, Northern Belize

AbstractThe rubber-ball game is a characteristic feature of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization. Masonry courts designed for variants of the game are relatively common at lowland Maya sites of the Late Classic period (660–900 A.C.). Before this period, ballcourts are extremely rare in this region; the developmental history of the game, therefore, remains obscure. Two masonry courts dating to the Late Preclassic period (400 B.C.–150 A.C.) have been discovered at the lowland Maya center of Cerros, northern Belize. The two courts are described in detail in terms of construction techniques, masonry style, architectural design and overall position in the settlement. It is concluded that these courts are neither experimental nor unique and, therefore, that more masonry courts will be discovered dating to this period. It is further suggested that the apparent absence of courts during the Early Classic period (300–600 A.C.) is a real hiatus reflecting the adoption of a variant of the game played without mason...

A Conversation With Gordon Willey

Introduction [DF]: Gordon Willey is the Bowditch Professor emeritus at Harvard. He is one of the foremost American archaeologists of the 2oth century and has made substantive contributions to the literature on preColumbian North, Central, and South America in the course of a career spanning six decades. His settlementpattern study on the Virui Valley in Peru [I953] established that field method as a standard in American research. Method and Theory in American Archaeology [I95 8], coauthored with Philip Phillips, was a watershed in archaeological theory in the Americas. During his tenure as Bowditch Professor, Willey directed and saw through to complete publication four major research projects in three modern nations occupied by the ancient Maya-an unrivaled record in Maya archaeology. While at Harvard he trained many generations of archaeologists whose widely varying interests and perspectives encompass the field. In i982, Richard Leventhal and Alan Kolata published his bibliography in the second of two volumes of essays in his honor: it covered I7 pages. He continues to make major contributions to American archaeology. This conversation took place in Cambridge in April I992.